This has been asked here before, but I haven't seen any responses to the question. So, here it goes again:

"How can I read signals from a Phidget Interface Kit 8/8/8 into PD, in Windows?"

I'll appreciate any help in this, as I've spent a couple of days searching and trying with absolutely no results

Many thanks

Have you checked out what shows up via [notein], [ctlin], [hidin]?

Edit ~ if I am correct in understanding that your device's USB connection only draws power from the computer, and *does not send* any signal,... then you will probably have to feed your outputs into the computer via some sort of midi-board.

Good luck!

Phidget communication is done by a low-lever C-library. Unlike Arduino, they cannot be reconfigured to "speak" say serial, or udp.... Phidgets does provide higher-level "glue" libraries for COM, .NET, AS3, Java, Python, Max/MSP and MSRS. Unless someone created a [phidget] object, or there is a way to access a COM (not COM-port; microsoft COM) in pd, you'll have to use some Daemon to translate the data. Looking at the example code, the most promising option from my experience with several of the environments available is AutoIT. AutoIT is a very useful language for scripting OS functions, and has BASIC-like syntax -- it can even access shared libs. I prefer it to VBScript/batch: my go-to language for automating windows. Depending on the nature of what you want to do, it would be pretty easy to implement a Daemon in AutoIT that could hook the COM and relay that data via UDP, socket, etc.

[edit]

Looking into it a little more, there *IS* a "Phidget Webservice", which communicates via XML-sockets, but the messages would probably be hard to process, due to Pd's lack of a sane stream/string processing object.

Many thanks, ShankarBaba and nestor, for your pointers. I conclude what I feared: that there is no straight-forward ready-to-use solution available to read Phidgets from PD. For the time being I've moved my efforts to Arduino. However, I intend to explore into what you tell me, at some point. I'll post back here if I learn anything from that exploration.

But many thanks again.

Yeah, that is the problem with Phidgets. They have GREAT modules, that are very useful with other micros as well. However, I think their deviceServer model is a little restrictive. If you know that you want to use Flash, it's great, but I'd stick to the 'duino with Pd.